Uganda president confirms: I will make anti-gay bill law

Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni has reaffirmed his promise to make the anti-gay bill law.

He has responded to President Barack Obama who called on him to drop the bill or face a more ‘complicated’ relationship with the United States.

There are unconfirmed reports that Museveni has already signed the bill and is merely delaying delivering it to parliament to prevent international outrage.

Releasing a statement, the Ugandan president set out his three views on the legislation, saying he agreed with ‘almost all Ugandans’ that promotion of homosexuality should be criminalized.

He said he also believes gay prostitutes and any exhibition of homosexual behavior should be punished.

Museveni said he disagreed with some members of parliament (MPs) because he felt homosexuals were ‘rare deviations in nature from the normal’.

‘I, therefore, thought that similarly there were people that were born with the disorientation of being attracted to the same sex,’ he said.

After he sought ‘scientific’ opinions, Museveni then said homosexuality could be ‘learnt and could be unlearnt’.

But perhaps most surprisingly, Museveni said if the US government can prove gay people are born then they will review Uganda’s anti-gay laws.

‘I would be among those who will spearhead that effort,’ he said.

‘That is why I had refused to sign the Bill until my premise was knocked down by the position of our scientists.’

Museveni added: ‘Africans do not seek to impose their views on anybody. We do not want anybody to impose their views on us.

‘This very debate was provoked by Western groups who come to our schools and try to recruit children into homosexuality. It is better to limit the damage rather than exacerbate it.’

Even if Museveni has not signed the bill and does not deliver it to parliament today (21 February), as widely predicted, it may still become law as the parliament can put it on the statue books without his signature.

Researchers recorded the brain activity of 48 gay fathers when they could see their kids and compared that to the brain activity of heterosexual mothers and fathers and found they displayed similarities to both